Fungi have been recognized as a prolific source of secondary metabolites and 38% biologically active compounds originated from microbes are produced by fungi, which have yielded some of the most important products of the pharmaceutical industry, such as penicillins, cephalosporins, mevastatin and lovastatin.1, 2 Nevertheless, fungi are still one of the most promising microbiotic sources for new lead compounds because only a small part of the mycota is known.3 To find more pharmaceutically active metabolites from fungi, we carried out a chemical investigation on dematiaceous hyphomycetes. During our research, we found that the crude extract from Curvularia inaequalis strain HS-FG-257 exhibited cytotoxicity against certain tumor cell lines. The further work led to the discovery of two new substances, curvularone A (1) and 4-hydroxyradianthin (2). In this paper, we report the fermentation, isolation, chemical characterization and the bioactivities of the two new compounds.

The producing strain HS-FG-257 was isolated from a soil sample collected from woodland of Heilongjiang province, China. It was provided and identified as Curvularia inaequalis Shear by the Professor Tianyu Zhang at the Shandong Agricultural University, China. The strain HS-FG-257 has been deposited in the Pharmaceutical Research Culture Collection, Zhejiang Hisun Group Co., Ltd. with accession No: HS-FG-257.

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